Thursday, September 11, 2014

The Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based non-profit organization which monitors hate groups, announced this week that it has learned that the League of the South is forming a paramilitary unit to be called “the Indomitables.”

The League of the South, whose name is inspired by Italy’s similarly right-wing, anti-immigrant, separatist Northern League (Lega Nord), is the most prominent organization in the United States working toward the secession of the Southern states as what it in particular would call Confederation of Southern States (C.S.S.). (The original secessionist South, during the Civil War, was officially the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.). The League wants the C.S.S. to be the eleven core C.S.A. states, without Texas and with Kentucky and Oklahoma added. Texas, of course, has its own separatist movement.) Though it claims to be mainly interested in “preserving Southern culture,” its rhetoric is shot through with intolerant, often white-supremacist, ideas, and its membership overlaps heavily with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi parties. For a while, the League sponsored registered state political parties, primarily in Georgia and the Carolinas, called the Southern Party (S.P.).

Michael Hill, president of the League, has described the group’s aims this way: “We are for the survival, well-being, and independence of the Southern people. And when we say ‘the Southern people,’ we mean white Southerners. We are an ethno-nationalist movement and we want a free and independent South for our people, as our homeland. That’s pretty much what we are fighting for.”

Michael Hill, president of the League of the South

Information on a novel paramilitary turn for what had until now been mainly a group that makes lots of noise comes from leaked internal documents and anonymous sources within the group, according to the S.P.L.C. article on the subject. One of the internal documents outlining the plans is by President Hill himself, who writes, “We desire that our women and children be warm and snug while the world outside rages. And as our due for that we must face the world.”

“The Indomitables were conceptualized at the LOS national meeting earlier this year,” according to the S.P.L.C. article by Ryan Lenz, “and appear to be coming online quickly, with Floyd Eric Meadows, 43, of Rome, Ga., who also goes by Eric Thorvaldsson online, in charge of ‘training,’ according to sources within the group and internal documents.” The article also releases confidentially acquired images from Thorvaldsson’s Facebook presence, which is full of pagan iconography and white-supremacist “dogwhistle” references like “‘earning’ his red bootlaces––awarded in skinhead culture for drawing blood for ‘the movement.’”

The Indomitables’ head trainer, Floyd Meadows, posted this on Facebook
recently using his pseudonym.

Hill responded to the S.P.L.C. revelations by stating defiantly, on his blog, “Even if we are––and you really have no idea on earth if we are or not––setting up a Southern militia or some other form of paramilitary organization, we are doing nothing that free men have not done for centuries. Deal with it and stop your whining.”

Nazi-style insignia used in confidential
League of the South documents leaked to S.P.L.C.

“The primary targets,” Hill went on, “will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.”

The League has been in the news lately because one of its members, Michael Anthony Peroutka, is running for a council seat in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Peroutka, who ran for U.S. president on the Constitution Party ticket in 2004, says he deplores racism in all forms but refuses to distance himself from the League. His own Republican Party, however, has distanced itself from him from the beginning of his county council candidacy.

Michael Peroutka, posing with a fellow secessionist, whose former job he once applied for.

Not long ago, Hill told an interviewer, regarding the upcoming September 18th referendum on independence in Scotland, “We think it’s a great thing that the Scottish people actually get to go to the polls and decide their future with a vote. That’s something that I hope that we can do one day.” But, unlike the League, the Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) is not backing up its political efforts with an armed terrorist squadron. Despite constant references to the South’s unique “Anglo-Celtic” culture, the League of the South is starting to sound less like Scotland’s separatists and more like those in northern Nigeria or southeastern Ukraine.

Due to the “Anglo-Celtic” connection, St. Andrew’s crosses and similar insignia recur in League of the South heraldry.
See an article from this blog for more detail on Confederate–Russian–Ukrainian-Scottish separatist vexillological affinities.

About Me

Chris Roth is a social-cultural and linguistic anthropologist with an interest in the symbolic politics of nationalism and ethnicity. He has worked extensively with indigenous groups in northern British Columbia and southeast Alaska and is the author of an ethnography of the Tsimshian Nation.